Almost every year, for what is fast approaching half a century, tens of thousands have descended on the tiny village of Pilton in southwest England to attend the five-day festival.

Stagecore Productions, led by Steve Bedlam and Bertie Hunter, handled all technical provisions for The Common area and contracted Neuron Pro Audio, while Danley UK, the distributor for the UK and Ireland, assisted.

The sound system consisted of two Pure Groove by Danley PG-J94 Jericho Horns and two Danley J3-94 Jericho Horns arranged in four points radiating outward from above the stage. In total, 22 Danley TH-118 subwoofers contributed to three subwoofer locations: two end-fired arrays at stage left and stage right plus one CSA cardioid array at the back of the space. All the subwoofer arrays were configured to minimise output in the direction of the village and in the direction of other nearby stages. Four Danley OS-80 loudspeakers provided fill for the walkways around the very upper and outer edges of the space, and two Danley SH-96 loudspeakers provided fill for those enthusiastically pinned up against the DJ booth.

The show could not have gone more smoothly for our first expedition to the legendary Glastonbury site.

- Kyle Marriott, Neuron Pro Audio

An Allen & Heath dLive C3500 surface with a DM64 stage box provided an interface to the system, while a Danley DNA SC48 DSP in front of two Danley DNA 20K4 Pro four-channel amps joined eight Powersoft multichannel amplifiers to drive the entire system.

Once it was built, the system took very little effort to tune: “We did a lot of pre-planning work,” explained Kyle Marriott, who designed the system for Neuron Pro Audio with the help of Neuron project manager Jonny Wharton. “I have spent considerable time with the system and have an alignment that works well if the sub and main box fronts are co-located together. It allowed me to carry out the majority of the on-site alignment using a range finder and verification via dual-channel FFT.

“The show could not have gone more smoothly for our first expedition to the legendary Glastonbury site,” he added. “The design tools and data provided by Danley UK, plus the communication from the Common and the Stagecore staff and crew, allowed everything to work as expected, with minimal fuss.

“The brief for The Temple stage from the design team of The Common was to minimise the ‘DJ as a god’ feeling that you often get with stages of this size,” Marriott concluded. “We were able to convincingly demonstrate that we could fill a large space with consistent, even coverage using a fraction of the boxes normally deployed for such a venue.”